Pure unadulterated joy, and butts shaken and stirred

On their new album, the aptly titled 'Burn It Down,' The Dynamites improbably turn up the heat and bring their Soul simmer to a full boil. If James Brown was the Godfather of Soul, Charles Walker is his consigliore — he sings with hellhound conviction, divinely inspired passion and otherworldly intensity.

The death of Patrick Swayze and the cartoonishly rude antics of Kanye West at the MTV awards will dominate the news for days to come and are likely to overwhelm any attention that might have been rightly paid to the passing last Friday of poet/author/Punk frontman Jim Carroll. A fitting salute would be to seek out a copy of 'The Basketball Diaries' and read his journal kept as a teenager whom Jack Kerouac once called "better than 89 percent of the novelists working today."